Ten minutes into Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975; Zerkalo or The Mirror), there’s a scene where a doctor (Anatoly Solonitsyn from Stalker) walks away from a conversation with a woman, Maria (Margarita Terekhova) he has met travelling through the countryside. As we see the back of him in the middle distance of a field, a wind passes through and makes a travelling wave through the grass. I threw up my hands and said out loud, “That is beautiful!” (The wind blowing through grass and trees is a recurring symbol; an influence on The Sopranos?). This was an intriguing if elusive cinematic experience. While the other Tarkovsky films have been longer, near three hours, they also had sci-fi plots and a bit more of a hook. This was a shorter film at two hours but more strange in how it presented a collection of memories, flashbacks, dreams and surreal moments, all of which focus on the unseen (though heard) protagonist, a writer in his forties, thinking of his mother when he was a child, his ex-wife (also played by Terekhova who is great) and his son, all of it blurring together, and most of it based on Tarkovsky’s own life (his own mother appears as the older ‘Maria’’). For me, watching more Ingmar Bergman films recently, there was a clearer connection or influence here. The ways in which the camera focuses on the mother character, the back of her head in centre frame or the face as they are questioned by an off-screen (often male) presence. There are some starkly memorable images such as the burning house in the forest or the mother floating above her bed as well as the use of archival historical footage to give the film a grounding in Russian history, particularly post-war. I feel if I returned to it again, I might decipher and understand it more, and at times, I was a bit out to sea with the film; still, it was quite something. Definitely sets the stage for what someone like Terrence Malick might do in his later career, but more elliptical and boldly artistic. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 